Apps4Europe business lounge @Helsinki

Apps for Europe Business Lounge, organized the 25th of September in Helsinki, offered an opportunity for open data entrepreneurs, start-ups and appmakers to pitch their work to investors. Ossi Kuittinen, Senior Fellow of Open Knowledge Finland, opened the event. He talked about the business opportunities of open data for Finnish companies.
 
There were five companies pitching their ideas and applications. The audience got a chance to rate their innovativeness, business potential and usability, among others. The winner was Peter Tarttersall’s company Hahmota. Congratulations!
 
Tattersall pitched his software Veropuu (“FinanceTree”), making budgets and accounts understandable to everybody. Veropuu creates visualisations of money flows, organisational structures and metadata in a way that helps experts and non-experts alike to gain meaningful insight.
 

      
 
As the winner of the Business Lounge, Tattersall gets to participate the FutureEverything festival where he can pitch the software to an international network of European investors.
 
The FutureEverything festival is organised at the 26-28th of February 2015 in Manchester, UK. It brings people together to discover, share and experience new ideas for the future. It combines a large scale cultural event – encompassing art, music and discussion – with new technology, novel research methods and playful social experiments.
 

 
Other companies pitching in the event were Lari Lohikoski (2nd in the rating), Pauli Misikangas (3rd), Tommi Kainulainen and Olli-Pekka Pohjola.
 
Lari Lohikoski from Born Local introduced Nearhood, a hyperlocal media platform. Nearhood brings together everything related to a neighbourhood. It enables residents to communicate with each other, find local events and follow news and other information related to their area.
 

 
    
 
Olli-Pekka Pohjola introduced Diory.me, your Personal Web and digital memory. Personal Web is a new way for people to think, handle and use digital information. Instead of files and folders you have your own personal web that is very much like the WWW – but it’s yours.
 
Tommi Kainulainen presented Observis, a company creating applications and games based on geographic information. One of its games is called X-routes. It helps to learn new things by combining physical activities, competitions and visualized learning materials.

 
     
 
Pauli Misikangas told about the Cloud’N’Sci, a marketplace starting a new era in open data based business. The marketplace offers an easy way to commercialize and utilize open data based solutions as data refining services. It’s is a way for open data developers to turn their hobby projects into sustainable businesses and earn by doing what they love.
 
“I heard many interesting business ideas and good quality plans during the event. I wish these companies a successful future”, summarized Angel Investor Tapio Heikkilä.
 
Thank you all for participation!
 
 
The event was organised by Apps4Europe and Apps4Finland.

 

More reading